Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain

By Louis Simpson 1923–2012 Louis Simpson

                  . . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
                  previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
                                                                              Ortega y Gasset

Neither on horseback nor seated,

But like himself, squarely on two feet,

The poet of death and lilacs

Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive

Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama

And the girl who played the piano?

Where are you, Walt?

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?

These houses build of wood sustain

Colossal snows,

And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!

Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.

“It seems you have found me out.

Yet did I not warn you that it was Myself

I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

I gave no prescriptions,

And those who have taken my moods for prophecies

Mistake the matter.”

Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me?

I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.

Yet I am happy, because you found me out.”

A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,

Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing

Official scenarios,

Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted

American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,

And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,

And the earth, are relieved.

All that grave weight of America

Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.

The future in ruins!

The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals

Unbuilding, and roses

Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,

The Bay mists clearing,

And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,

Dances like Italy, imagining red.

Source: Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001 (BOA Editions Ltd., 2003)

Biography

Poet, editor, translator, and critic Louis Simpson was born in 1923, in Jamaica, to Scottish and Russian parents. A contemporary of Confessional poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, Simpson’s early work followed a familiar arc. In the New York Times Book Review, critic David Orr noted its highlights: “Simpson has followed a path lined with signposts sunk so deep in our nation's poetic terra firma that . . .

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